A team of astronomers from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA-TIFR) in Pune, and the Raman Research Institute (RRI), in Bengaluru, has used the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) to measure the atomic hydrogen content of galaxies seen as they were 8 billion years ago, when the universe was young. This is the earliest epoch in the universe for which there is a measurement of the atomic gas content of galaxies. This research has been published in the…

In the global race to measure ever shorter time spans, physicists from Goethe University Frankfurt have now taken the lead: together with colleagues at the accelerator facility DESY in Hamburg and the Fritz-Haber-Institute in Berlin, they have measured a process that lies within the realm of zeptoseconds for the first time: the propagation of light within a molecule. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second (10 exp -21 seconds). In 1999, the Egyptian chemist Ahmed Zewail…

A European network, which aims to develop human-centered AI with ethical values, has been launched under the leadership of DFKI. HumanE-AI-Net brings together top European research centres, universities and key industrial champions in a network of centres of excellence which will develop a truly human-centric brand of European AI and strengthen Europe’s position in global competition. This ambitious project, which is being funded by the European Union initially for three years, started in early September. Trustworthy AI with comprehensible decisions “To be accepted by…

Scientists design a novel quantum circuit that calculates the fast Fourier transform, an indispensable tool in all fields of engineering. The Fourier transform is an important mathematical tool that decomposes a function or dataset into a its constituting frequencies, much like one could decompose a musical chord into a combination of its notes. It is used across all fields of engineering in some form or another and, accordingly, algorithms to compute it efficiently have been developed–that is, at least for…

This new type of quasiparticles could have applications in quantum computing. Our understanding of quantum physics has involved the creation of a wide range of “quasiparticles.” These notional constructs describe emergent phenomena that appear to have the properties of multiple other particles mixed together. An exciton, for example, is a quasiparticle that acts like an electron bound to an electron hole, or the empty space in a semiconducting material where an electron could be. A step further, an exciton-polariton combines…

… but not for the same reasons as on Earth In 2015, the New Horizons space probe discovered spectacular snowcapped mountains on Pluto, which are strikingly similar to mountains on Earth. Such a landscape had never before been observed elsewhere in the Solar System. However, as atmospheric temperatures on our planet decrease at altitude, on Pluto they heat up at altitude as a result of solar radiation. So where does this ice come from? An international team led by CNRS…

Intelligent cameras could be one step closer thanks to a research collaboration between the Universities of Bristol and Manchester who have developed cameras that can learn and understand what they are seeing. Roboticists and artificial intelligence (AI) researchers know there is a problem in how current systems sense and process the world. Currently they are still combining sensors, like digital cameras that are designed for recording images, with computing devices like graphics processing units (GPUs) designed to accelerate graphics for…

… and temperature variation on distant stars New research is helping to explain one of the big questions that has perplexed astrophysicists for the past 30 years – what causes the changing brightness of distant stars called magnetars. Magnetars were formed from stellar explosions or supernovae and they have extremely strong magnetic fields, estimated to be around 100 million, million times greater than the magnetic field found on earth. The magnetic field generates intense heat and x-rays. It is so…

Researchers at Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) have discovered a cost-effective way to tune the spectrum of a laser to the infrared. Researchers at Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) have discovered a cost-effective way to tune the spectrum of a laser to the infrared, a band of great interest for many laser applications. They collaborated with Austrian and Russian research teams to develop this innovation, which is now the subject of a patent application. The results…

From microscopes to data transfer via optical fibres all the way to modern quantum technologies, light plays an important role in science and industry. Particularly methods for changing the colour – and hence the frequency and wavelength – of light are of great importance in modern applications. Those methods require the use of nonlinear crystals. In such crystals, two photons of a particular frequency can, for instance, be turned into one photon having twice that frequency – say, two red…

An international research team from TU Wien (Vienna), IST Austria and MIT (USA) has developed a new artificial intelligence system based on the brains of tiny animals, such as threadworms. This novel AI-system can control a vehicle with just a few artificial neurons. The team says that system has decisive advantages over previous deep learning models: It copes much better with noisy input, and, because of its simplicity, its mode of operation can be explained in detail. It does not…

New research shows that sunspots and other active regions can change the overall solar emissions. The sunspots cause some emissions to dim and others to brighten; the timing of the changes also varies between different types of emissions. This knowledge will help astronomers characterize the conditions of stars, which has important implications for finding exoplanets around those stars. An international research team led by Shin Toriumi at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency added up the different types of emissions observed…

The continuing progress in miniaturization of silicon microelectronic and photonic devices is causing cooling of the device structures to become increasingly challenging. Conventional heat transport in bulk materials is dominated by acoustic phonons, which are quasiparticles that represent the material’s lattice vibrations, similar to the way that photons represent light waves. Unfortunately, this type of cooling is reaching its limits in these tiny structures. However, surface effects become dominant as the materials in nanostructured devices become thinner, which means that…

Physicists at Mainz U successfully carry out the controlled transport of stored light. Patrick Windpassinger and his team demonstrate how light stored in a cloud of ultra-cold atoms can be transported by means of an optical conveyor belt. A team of physicists led by Professor Patrick Windpassinger at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has successfully transported light stored in a quantum memory over a distance of 1.2 millimeters. They have demonstrated that the controlled transport process and its dynamics has…

Sydney undergraduate unlocks bizarre secrets of a ticking time-bomb star. While on COVID lockdown, a University of Sydney honours student has written a research paper on a star system dubbed one of the “exotic peacocks of the stellar world”. Only one in a hundred million stars makes the cut to be classified a Wolf-Rayet: ferociously bright, hot stars doomed to imminent collapse in a supernova explosion leaving only a dark remnant, such as a black hole. Rarest of all, even…

At around 60 million light-years from Earth, the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy, NGC 1365, is captured beautifully in this image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Located in the constellation of Fornax (the Furnace), the blue and fiery orange swirls show us where stars have just formed and the dusty sites of future stellar nurseries. At the outer edges of the image, enormous star-forming regions within NGC 1365 can be seen. The bright, light-blue regions indicate the presence of hundreds…